In my previous post " profit and progress...the co$t of selling your soul ", I mused on creation and on the redemptive imagination of Jesus...the resurrection of a new creation. Does christianity lack the imagination to speak into what humanity is doing to creation, and what it's responsibility is. Some one whom has challenged my thinking for years is Jarrod McKenna, in a great article in Sojourners Magazine; God's Politics...he wrestled with the reality now.
( St.Francis:Creation )
What our response to the ecological crisis reveals is how ill equipped our Western imagination is to understand the Gospel as good news for all of creation. Much like in the 60s, the issue was not that the Gospel wasn’t good news for the oppressed seeking racial justice and reconciliation – it’s that too many Christians were blind to see it. They were blind to the reality that the Gospel meant not only personal transformation but social transformation, just as many of us are blind to the Gospel being more than just personal and social, but ecological and cosmological as well.
Polite talk of “creation care” or “stewardship” as a kind of appendix to the Christian faith is completely inadequate. The Gospel is not that Jesus came to redeem individuals. The Gospel is that Jesus came to redeem all of creation by grace, and we as individuals, together, can be a witness to that. Our ecological crisis calls us to rediscover the earth-affirming beauty of the kingdom of God. As Nicolas Berdyaev put it, “The kingdom of God is the transfiguration of the world, universal resurrection, a new heaven and a new earth.” Or, in the words of Karl Barth, the Christian hope is that “we wait for Easter to become a universal reality.”
( Jarrod McKenna...the National Adviser for Youth, Faith and Activism for World Vision Australia. He is the founder of EPYC and co-founder of the Peace Tree Intentional Community in Perth. You can follow him on Twitter here. This article originally appeared via ABC Religion & Ethics. )
Read...the whole article...HERE.
